Polo, Anyone?
It Was a Day for High Society, High Spirits and High Fashion. Oh, and Horses.

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 19, 2006

It was a lovely day for polo. Really. Just lovely.

This was Saturday at the Great Meadow Polo Club near The Plains, out in the Virginia Piedmont. There was the Ambassadors' Cup, which drew a lot of international diplomats and some buff professional players. They played for the Chief of Protocol Trophy, a friendly competition the U.S. chief of protocol has hosted for the past five years.

There was the Courage Cup, a charity event, and a handful of other matches. Organizers billed it as one of the biggest polo events in the region since the sport's Jazz Age glory days, when polo was an Olympic sport.

These days, although polo is again gaining popularity, matches are as much a society as an equestrian sporting event.

So Saturday afternoon, there were a few hundred well-heeled observers ducking into white tents to get out of the heat, gazing out at a manicured grass field. We can't say how many people overall as we were not allowed in the Ambassadors' tent. Because, we were told, a society magazine was sponsoring the tent and other reporter lowlifes weren't allowed in.

We were so upset at this.

But then we were out on the field with everybody else during the divot stomp. This is a break in the match where people drink champagne and say things like, "Hey, the brown thing isn't a divot !" And we met Dustee Tucker, who is from Dallas and is in public relations. We asked her how she would describe the event, and she said:

"It is truly the beautiful people of the day. The champagne is free-flowing and smiles are abundant."

Did we mention Tucker is in PR?

Then the man on the public-address system said something that sounded like this:

"BLEREIOUSN NEED THE BLWERS CHAMPAGNE IOSEKBL THANK YOU!"

This was generally understood to mean the patrons had to get off the field. Apparently the buff pros wanted to get back to playing. Our usually reliable notebook says the team sponsored by Moet was leading the team sponsored by Outback, 4-3, at this point.

So we followed Tucker back to a big white tent on the east side of the field. It was cooler in there. They had free wine and champagne and strawberries and cream and little salmon sandwiches on brown bread and shrimp and creamy white things that tasted like they were supposed to be dessert.

This was a great tent.

We were talking with Tucker, who was giving us the lay of the land, and Mimi Falb, an accomplished horse rider who is interning on Capitol Hill; Caroline Poarch, a law student at American University; Alexia Rouquette, up from Miami, where she does high-end real estate; Ashton Randle, who lobbies for the DCI Group; Osmar Nunez, who owns the Mate bar in Georgetown; and Adaeze Igwe and Kene Ezemenari, Nigerians who work for the World Bank.

Lots of champagne and loud chatter.

Thwack , the sound of the ball when the players come close. Some people, they stand out in front of the tent and watch. One time, the Outback team scored a goal right before the end of the fourth "chukker" (period) to tie the match at 7. Two people clapped.

Maybe they went bananas over in the Ambassadors' tent. It was too far away to see.

"Whoo," said Igwe, flapping out her blouse a bit. It was getting hot now.

She was good-naturedly pretending not to care that the Nigerians didn't make the World Cup but the pesky Ghanaians did. She said the polo match isn't "hoity-toity" at all. But it has to be mentioned that she went to a posh boarding school in Connecticut where the school had a polo team, and Ezemenari was giving her a sidelong glance.

"Maybe it is a little bit, but everybody is very nice," Ezemenari said. "It's a lovely day."

She's right. Polo is one of the world's oldest games, starting more than 2,000 years ago in Asia. It migrated to the West by way of the British Empire and requires a great deal of equestrian talent. The ponies make sudden stops and starts and sprints, all in pursuit of a ball that is to be whacked through a goal. It's beautiful to watch, more complicated than jump courses and perhaps not as spirited as speed-racing events in rodeo. Like thoroughbred racing, it is staggeringly expensive to play on a serious level; unlike racing, it is no longer very popular with people who can't afford to play it.

"I look at the economy based on polo," said Scott Riehl, a lawyer who often comes out to Great Meadow for twilight polo on Saturdays. "When the economy is down, people get out of polo. It's discretionary funds, no question."

An afternoon of high-society polo is also kind of like golf, in that it is one of the few events where men wear pants of pink and green and brown seersucker and various pastel shades. Women wear high heels, even on the grass. They leave tiny little dots in the ground, society cleat marks.

There was a "first chukker" match early in the day, a thing for some of the society players to get out on the ponies. Five hours later, guys were still wearing their brown leather knee boots, tight white pants, and jerseys while walking around the tent.

This one guy, he said to a blonde in a white dress, "I missed a couple shots. I said, 'Oh, whatever.' ''

"In the grand scheme of things, it seemed okay," she said.

"Oh yes, yes."

In front of the tent, there was a guy with blond hair, cut short in the back, longer in the front. He was wearing his riding outfit. Smiles, shades on.

Snap, snap, went the society photographers. You wondered if Tom and Nick and Daisy all did this in "Gatsby," or whether it just seemed like they should have.

Somehow it got late. The shadows were coming on. People were leaving the Ambassadors' tent.

Dustee Tucker floated by again: "The champagne is free-flowing and the . . . "

She wore her shades, the ones with the light brown tint.

The catering people put up the food. Thwack , somebody hit the ball.

"BLWOUYD HE REALLY HIT ADKHERSLL THANK YOU FOR COMING," said the announcer.

So a seat now, a seat please, just a minute. Perhaps one more champagne, something refreshing? Thank you. Thank you. Just a moment here. We just watched the ponies run on the grass, late in the afternoon, the shadows coming on. Yes. Yes.

Wasn't it lovely?